After being married for nearly five months, my wife Teri and I have finally taken a week off from work to go on our honeymoon.  Spring is a busy time at both of our workplaces, so we thought we’d wait until we really needed a vacation.  It couldn’t have come at a better time, with VBS just finished for Teri and a major project at National Instruments completing for me.

After considering destinations as diverse as British Columbia and Bali, we finally settled on a more modest but nevertheless beautiful destination: Vail, CO.  We found a great deal on a condo there and looked forward to escaping the heat.  In an effort to save money and maximize our time in Colorado, we opted for the earlier of the two direct Southwest flights to Denver…departing at 6:05 AM.

We awoke this morning at 3 AM, showered and ate a bit of breakfast.  Neither of us were particularly happy to be up this early, but were excited to begin our vacation.  At 4:30, we loaded up our car and headed to the person’s house who had agreed to drive us to the airport.

The house was dark.  Not a good sign.  We knocked on the door several times, and tried calling and texting.  No response, no light in the window, nothing.  After a few minutes passed, we had no choice but to drive ourselves and park the car at the airport (as it turns out, there was a misunderstanding about our departure time being AM instead of PM).  We arrived at the airport at around 5, parked, and thankfully got right on a shuttle.  About 5 minutes later, we unloaded our three large suitcases and backpack and entered the terminal.

We began to get a bit worried when we saw a much longer queue for security than we had expected on an early Wednesday morning.  After 15 minutes of waiting in line and checking our bags (which involved moving some contents around due to one bag being over the 50lb limit), we surveyed the security lines and decided the one next to Southwest’s bag check was really long and decided to try our luck at a different security station.  After glancing at a Denver flight on one of the departure screens, we saw gate 24 listed and got in line for security on that end of the airport.  Teri, who has flown Southwest many times, remarked that she thought Southwest was usually at the other end of the airport, but we shrugged it off.

About 15 minutes in the queue our concern about the time began to mount.  It was now 5:35 and at the rate we were going, it was beginning to look like we’d be at security right at 6:05.  Uh oh.

I married a resourceful woman.  With 25 minutes to go before our flight was supposed to depart, Teri got the attention of the TSA agent who was allowing people into the VIP line.  She explained our situation and asked if there’s any way we could get in the shorter line.  I admittedly didn’t feel particularly comfortable about this, but let her do her thing.  The TSA agent asked if she had a “membership card.”  Teri began shuffling through her purse, pulling out cards she happened to have with Delta and American Airlines logos on them and asked “does this count.”  The agent, a bit flustered with all the passenger traffic, gave in and let us into the shorter line.

But now we had only 20 minutes.  After another 10 minutes in this line, we finally got to security and put our items through the conveyor belt.  Right before our parcels got x-rayed, the bag in front of ours got stopped for a bag-check.  It took what felt like an eternity for a TSA bag checker to arrive and get the line moving again.

We made it through, and Teri took off running, shoes in hand, toward gate 24 (which happened to be the last gate in the terminal) to see if they could hold it for me to catch up.  I got my stuff and, shoes in hand, took off after her.  As I neared the gate, Teri turned to me with a frightened look and said it was the wrong gate.  We looked at another departure screen, this time with 4 Denver flights instead of the previous 1, and saw that gate 24 was for a different airline and our gate was actually number 8.

It’s was now right at 6:05 and I tore off toward the gate to see if we could make it, with Teri not far behind.  Out of breath, I heard the Southwest agent tell me we had 4 minutes.  I looked for Teri and saw her a ways back and ran back to help her with some of the stuff she was carrying.  We got to the gate, handed him our boarding passes, and ran down the hall to the plane.

Needless to say, we were (nearly) the last people on the plane and there were no seats next to each other available.  But there were two middle seats toward the front and we took them, sweaty but relieved.

As Teri explained what happened to the man next to her and mentioned that we’re on our honeymoon, he generously offered to switch places with me.  As it turned out, we ended up setting next to each other in the second row of the plane.  It doesn’t get much better than that.

The plane took off, we got our bags without incident, and managed to get right on a shuttle bus to our rental car.

The little Ford Focus we rented was the coupe version which made fitting all our luggage a bit challenging, but between the trunk and the back seat we managed.  We left the airport area and headed West.

Rental cars aren’t known to be powerful or plush.  As it turns out, ours fared rather well in the latter category (leather seats!), but was definitely lacking in power (something the Budget agent warned us about when she heard we were headed into the mountains…but I didn’t want to upgrade to the SUV she was recommending).  Merging into highway traffic was a bit of a chore with the pedal to the metal, and picking up speed to pass required patience.  We eventually got up to speed and were cruising along and then heard a strange beep.  The second time it occurred I noticed a readout that said “nearing top speed.”  I was going 75.  After all our complaining about the car’s lack of power, this was rather hilarious.  (I noticed later that the car is electronically limited, probably at Budget’s request, at 80mph…the car is technically capable of going 120mph although I can’t imagine how long it must take to get there).  The car ended up doing fine in the mountains leading to Vail, although it definitely was revving high just to maintain speed up the inclines.

Anyway, to wrap this up, we grabbed breakfast (thinking amusedly about the fact that everyone around us probably just woke up – it was 8:30 local time – and yet we had already travelled all the way from Austin this morning) and groceries in Golden and hit the road for Vail.  We arrived around noon, checked in to our condo, and settled in.

We were very pleasantly surprised by our condo.  We paid a little under $700 for 7 nights and scored a gorgeous Vail Racquet Club unit right on the river with a full kitchen (complete with granite countertops and appliances/cookware), HDTV and a beautiful bathroom.  We also have access to the complex’s heated lap pool and gym.

Quite the comedy of errors today, but we thank God we’re here safely and on time despite all the drama.  Right now we don’t feel like doing anything but napping (Teri’s doing this now) and watching Masterchef Australia (our latest addiction), but look forward to doing more “mountainy” things tomorrow.

Cozy!

Free, fast wi-fi means Hulu/Netflix are at our fingertips (not to mention various videos I loaded up before we left).  Hooking up to the HDMI port and auxiliary audio was a breeze thanks to the assortment of cables I brought to handle just about any type of TV situation .

Hey, that’s us!

Future posts won’t be as long, I promise, but I do hope to post more from our trip soon!